Oh, there's plenty of actual governing to be done in this lame-duck session -- taxes, unemployment benefits, START, DADT and the rest. This month could be our legislators' audition, if you will, a time to show the People that they can collaborate in our interest.
Fat chance.
GOP leaders, feeling their post-election oats, refused to devote even two hours to meet with Pres. Obama and ranking Democrats. They strutted afterward for the obligatory photo-op, certainly, just long enough to pay lip-service to bipartisanship. They even took time to assert right-wing censorship of art on display at the Smithsonian.
And then, with all that's at stake here and now, Senate Republicans found time to pen a letter to the chamber's majority leader. The gist:
"...we will not agree to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to any legislative item until the Senate has acted to fund the government and we have prevented the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers."In other words, Republicans will block everything else until the Senate votes to extend the (so-called) Bush-era tax cuts.
It's a political tantrum, a shameful partisan stunt. While it keeps an intellectually dishonest promise not to raise taxes, it flouts fiscal conservatism and lacks any semblance of economic credibility.Calling the prospective failure to extend tax cuts "job-killing," invoking a pithy old GOP chestnut, presumes that the cuts created jobs when they were implemented -- they didn't, they haven't and (if they're extended) they won't. I find it hard to believe that anyone still subscribes to "trickle-down economics," since it's never, ever worked beyond the anecdotal.
And just like Dems' wish to turn federal unemployment benefits into another entitlement program, extending the tax cuts effectively adds to a deficit Republicans pledged to reduce. The perpetual practice of spending money we don't have -- by both parties -- is fundamental to why our nation's economy is on the road to ruin.
Any meaningful proposal to fix what's broken must be the product of collaboration among factions now preoccupied with the next election cycle. Neither side would get everything it wants -- which would be fine, since neither side has a monopoly on good ideas. Their solutions must incorporate both cuts in spending and increases in revenue.
No, I'm not excited about paying higher taxes, nor am I looking forward to (for example) working years longer before drawing Social Security. But if I want my country to be here for my spawns and their spawns, that's what it'll take. There are no other options.
Time is short, too -- we have two years, maybe less, to get our national barge turned around. And that means that we've already elected the representatives who will (or won't) do what's required to save our country.
I don't think they can. Even if they could, we wouldn't let them.
Governing is crippled by politics. Economic recovery -- like everything else, it seems -- is poisoned by ideology. We're screwed.
I ache for my country.
